4 Critical Mistakes Content Marketers Make
Medium · Marketing & Branding · 2015 · 901 words
Visa advises content marketers to write for a single specific reader rather than a general audience, with examples drawn from advertising.
4 Critical Mistakes Content Marketers Make
I've been writing on the web for over a decade now, and I've been writing in a "professional, business" setting for 2 years now.
In my experience, here are the 4 critical mistakes that content marketers make.
1: Not Writing For A Single, Specific Reader
Write for the smartest, busiest version of your ideal customer.
It's very tempting to try and write something "for everybody". After all, why limit yourself? The world is your oyster, isn't it?
Yes… but no.
You see, people aren't interested in everybody.
'Everybody' is an abstraction. Everybody is nobody. If you really want to get somebody's attention, you'd address them by name. Or you'd talk about somebody else that they're interested in.
In David Ogilvy's _Confessions Of An Advertising Man_, Ogilvy describes how Max Hart (of Hart, Schaffner & Marx) and his advertising manager, George L. Dyer, were arguing about long copy.
Dyer said, "I'll bet you $10 I can write a newspaper page of solid type and you'd read every word of it."
Hart scoffed at the idea.
"I don't have to write a line of it to prove my point," Dyer replied. "I'll only tell you the headline:
**'This Page is All About Max Hart'.**
Here's something else to prove a point: Open a new tab and Google "[Open Letter](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=open+letter)".
Everybody loves open letters, especially when they're written to somebody specific. We're more interested in what Obama has to say about Kanye West than what Obama has to say to America. That's just how people are.
People are persons. Everybody is nobody.
2: Not Writing About A Single, Specific Problem
If we're vague about a problem, people don't respond by figuring out. They respond by moving on to the next thing in their feed.
Here's the hardest, bitter-est and yet most elucidating pill I had to swallow as a blogger-turned-content-marketer: People are too busy to listen to you ramble on. They've got more important things to do.
This isn't personal. They have lives to live. You are completely aware of this when you're a reader, but it's easy to forget when you're a writer.
How do you get someone to pay attention to you when they're busy and they're overwhelmed with information overload everyday?
You describe their problem clearly_. _ Everybody stops in their tracks when they encounter somebody else who understands them.
As C.S Lewis said, _"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."_
3: Repeating What Other People Have Already Written
Based on Matt Might's "The Illustrated Guide To a PhD"_._
When you take ownership of a blog, it's easy to think of it in isolation. It's your baby. You want to make sure that it covers everything that you care about.
The problem is, your blog doesn't exist in isolation.
It exists in a broader ecosystem full of other blogs. Your blog is, essentially, a mom-and-pop store that has to survive between giants like MegaCorp and SuperMart, as well as more established players who are like-you-but-better.
How do you compete?
You have to get a sense of the broader eco-system around you, and then you have to look for weak spots. You've to look for questions that haven't been asked, for patterns that haven't been identified.
These things are difficult to do.
If they were easy, somebody else would've already done them. Your challenge is to specialize deeply and write content that nobody else has quite written yet.
You'll never be 100% original, but you can offer a unique take that is valid for some context that hasn't been considered yet.
4: Wasting Precious Time Doing Unnecessary 'Research'
_Minimum Viable Content! This idea is shamelessly derived from Jussi Pasanen's (@jopas) idea of how to build Minimum Viable Product._
This I think was the greatest mistake of them all, for me. And I still make it from time to time. Actually, all the time.
See the thing is, if we lived in a perfect world and we could drink from the Mystical Well Of Infinite Resources, then we could do all the research that our hearts desired- everything about everything. Unfortunately, we live in a world with limited time, limited energy and limited resources.
Refer to the above visual.
The yellow area represents the limited resources that you have- time, energy, $$.
What do you do when you have limited resources? You prioritize. You have to figure out- what's the counter-intuitive, unexpected 'A-ha' moment that you want your reader to experience? And how do you get them there ASAP, considering you have limited resources?
To recap, the 4 most critical mistakes are:
1. Not writing for a specific person
2. Not writing about a specific problem
3. Writing something that's been written better by somebody else
4. Wasting your limited resources on unnecessary 'research''
Avoid these mistakes and you should generally be alright. Read a lot, re-read your older stuff, rewrite, ask why, look for assumptions, question, question, question.
Good luck! The world seriously could use some better content marketing. Life is short, and we ought to avoid wasting each other's time.
_If you'd like to dig deeper into these problems and walk through the solutions with me (and some of my favorite industry experts), you can read the post I wrote based on this for_ **_ReferralCandy_**_:_ [_Real Talk About Content Marketing (And The 4 Mistakes You'll Make_](http://blog.referralcandy.com/2014/11/28/minimum-viable-content-marketing-4-mistakes-you-make/)_)_
Originally published at https://medium.com/@visakanv/4-critical-mistakes-content-marketers-make-22e3223f25f8.